Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Gaim Settles w/ AOL: Changes Client Name to "Pidgin"

Last week "Gaim," the popular/open-source instant messaging protocol, released an announcement stating that they would officially be changing the name of their program to "Pidgin" in the near future.

According to the Gaim website, Gaim and AOL have been engaged in a long series of legal negotiations since the program was originally released on the web. AOL had originally contested the protocol's first name "GTK + AOL instant messenger", which lead to the name "Gaim." However, AOL recently trademarked the "AIM" acronym for instant messaging protocols, meaning that Gaim has been forced to change their name once again.